Awareness Support for Combining Individual and Collaborative Process Design in Co-located Meetings

The collaborative design of complex systems is a challenging task. It requires phases of linear as well as creativity oriented work. Also phases of collaborative work have to alternate with work in solitude, requiring a smooth transition between them. This in turn results in awareness becoming a crucial factor. Within the context of designing socio-technical processes through modeling we have developed tools and methods to integrate individual and collaborative creativity into modeling with special respect to awareness thus allowing for a smooth transition between phases of working in solitude and phases of collaboration. We have conducted multiple experiments on the subject following an action research approach which allowed for reflecting on the influence of awareness on collaborative process design in co-located meetings while also improving the socio-technical setting they were applied in. Derived from our findings we show requirements for further development of the socio-technical setting and show future directions such as the integration of the described setting into other areas of design.     

An Intelligent Data Integration Approach for Collaborative Project Management in Virtual Enterprises

The increasing globalization and flexibility required by companies has generated new issues in the last decade related to the managing of large scale projects and to the cooperation of enterprises within geographically distributed networks. ICT support systems are required to help enterprises share information, guarantee data-consistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with a main goal: to facilitate the activity of assembling, integration and the verification of a multi-enterprise project. The main achievement of the system from a data management perspective is to avoid inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources’ level and minimizes data replications. The developed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a web interface, a multi-agent data integration system, which supports information sharing and querying, and web-services that ensure the interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Gruppo Formula S.p.A. and tested by Alenia Spazio S.p.A. within the EU WINK Project (Web-linked Integration of Network based Knowledge—IST-2000-28221).     

An Approach for Recording Multimedia Collaborative Sessions: Design and Implementation

In this article we present the design and implementation of a videoconferencing session recorder multimedia system. Our system is a videoconferencing tool that has the capability of recording live multimedia collaborative/conferencing sessions. The main distinction between our architecture and other ones is that unlike other recording systems, which require the original application for the playback, our system generates Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) compliant documents which can be played back in any SMIL-compliant player.     

微处理器中异步FIFO的一种优化方法

在VLSI电路设计中,一个系统包含了多个时钟域,如何在这些不同的时钟域之间传递数据成了一个重要问题;在微处理器总线接口等多时钟系统中,采用异步FIFO传递数据是一种安全高效的方法,提出了一种优化的异步FIFO设计,以异步的方式产生标志信号,根据排队论确定最优的FIFO深度,并引入门控时钟技术降低了动态功耗;与其它设计相比,电路结构简单,在面积和功耗方面得到了改善,可以广泛在嵌入式微处理器中使用。     

Computer Support for Social Awareness in Flexible Work

How do we conceptualize social awareness, and what support is needed to develop and maintain social awareness in flexible work settings? The paper begins by arguing the relevance of designing for social awareness in flexible work. It points out how social awareness is suspended in the field of tension that exists between the ephemerality and continuity of social encounters, exploring ways to construct identity through relationships by means of social encounters – notably those that are accidental and unforced. We probe into this issue through design research: In particular, we present three exploratory prototyping processes in an open office setting (examining the concepts of a shared calendar, personal panels, and ambient awareness cues). Field studies, conducted in parallel, have contributed to a conceptual deconstruction of CSCW concepts, resulting in a focus on cues to relatedness, to belonging, and to care. Analyzing these three prototypes in their microcosmic usage setting results in specific recommendations for the three types of applications with respect to social awareness. The experiences indicate that the metaphors a ‘shared mirror’ and ‘breadcrumbs’ are promising foundations on which to base further design. We present these analyses and suggest that the metaphors work because of their ability to map experiences from the physical space into conceptual experiences. We conclude that social awareness in flexible work must be constructed indirectly, presenting itself as an option, rather than as a consequence of being able to overhear and oversee.     

Feature Weighting and Instance Selection for Collaborative Filtering: An Information-Theoretic Approach*

Collaborative filtering (CF) employing a consumer preference database to make personal product recommendations is achieving widespread success in E-commerce. However, it does not scale well to the ever-growing number of consumers. The quality of the recommendation also needs to be improved in order to gain more trust from consumers. This paper attempts to improve the accuracy and efficiency of collaborative filtering. We present a unified information-theoretic approach to measure the relevance of features and instances. Feature weighting and instance selection methods are proposed for collaborative filtering. The proposed methods are evaluated on the well-known EachMovie data set and the experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy and efficiency.*This work was performed in Corporate Technology, Siemens AG.     

Collaborative Support for Informal Information in Collective Memory Systems

Informal information, such as the expertise of an organization or the workarounds practiced by a community, is a critical part of organizational or collective memory systems. From a user-centered perspective, a user merely wishes to get his work done, and to do this, he must solve his immediate problems. We have examined how to incorporate this problem solving into a collective memory, as well as how to incorporate the learning that accrues to it or from it. We report here on two systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and the Collaborative Refinery, as well as an application, Answer Garden 2, built using these two systems. The Cafe ConstructionKit provides toolkit mechanisms for incorporating communication flows among people (as well as agents) into an organizational memory framework, and the Collaborative Refinery system provides mechanisms for distilling and refining the informal information obtained through these communication flows. The Answer Garden 2 application demonstrates the utility of these two underlying systems.     

加权支持向量回归的权值确定方法

针对标准支持向量回归中由于噪声和野点造成的回归误差.提出了一种基于线性规划的权值确定方法.该方法的基本思想是首先根据样本偏离数据域距离的不同,采用线性规划下的一类分类算法得到一个权值确定函数,然后将得到的权值确定函数应用于加权支持向量回归,加权的目的是为了减弱噪声和野点对回归结果的影响.实验表明,该权值确定方法与标准支持向量回归相比,可以有效减小回归误差,提高支持向量机抗噪声的能力.     

An Optimal Approach to Collaborative Target Tracking with Performance Guarantees

In this paper, we present a discrete-time optimization framework for target tracking with multi-agent systems. The “target tracking” problem is formulated as a generic semidefinite program (SDP) that when paired with an appropriate objective yields an optimal robot configuration over a given time step. The framework affords impressive performance guarantees to include full target coverage (i.e. each target is tracked by at least a single team member) as well as maintenance of network connectivity across the formation. Key to this work is the result from spectral graph theory that states the second-smallest eigenvalue—λ ₂—of a weighted graph’s Laplacian (i.e. its inter-connectivity matrix) is a measure of connectivity for the associated graph. Our approach allows us to articulate agent-target coverage and inter-agent communication constraints as linear-matrix inequalities (LMIs). Additionally, we present two key extensions to the framework by considering alternate tracking problem formulations. The first allows us to guarantee k-coverage of targets, where each target is tracked by k or more agents. In the second, we consider a relaxed formulation for the case when network connectivity constraints are superfluous. The problem is modeled as a second-order cone program (SOCP) that can be solved significantly more efficiently than its SDP counterpart—making it suitable for large-scale teams (e.g. 100’s of nodes in real-time). Methods for enforcing inter-agent proximity constraints for collision avoidance are also presented as well as simulation results for multi-agent systems tracking mobile targets in both ?² and ?³.     

A Collaborative Approach for Multi-Threaded SAT Solving

The last decade progresses have led the Satisfiability Problem (sat) to be a great and competitive practical approach to solve a wide range of industrial and academic problems. Thanks to these progresses, the size and difficulty of the sat instances has grown significantly. Among the recent solvers, a few are parallel and most of them use the message passing paradigm. In a previous work by Vander-Swalmen et al. (IWOMP, 146–157, 2008), we presented a fine grain parallel sat solver designed for shared memory using OpenMP and named mtss, for Multi Threaded Sat Solver. mtss extends the “guiding path” notion and uses a collaborative approach where a rich thread is in charge of the search-tree evaluation and where a set of poor threads yield logical or heuristics information to simplify the rich task. In this paper, we extend the poor thread abilities of mtss and present extensive comparative results on random 3-sat problems. These new experimentations show that fine grained techniques associated to poor tasks within the framework of mtss can achieve very interesting speedup on multi-core processors.     

基于WEB的协同论证决策支持系统

针对复杂产品研制过程中的总体方案论证,研究新环境、新技术和新条件下支持总体方案论证的决策支持系统。采用先进的计算机支持协同工作技术和广泛应用的WEB技术,构建一种科学合理的复杂产品论证方法。提出了基于WEB的复杂产品协同论证决策支持系统的总体构思,给出了该系统的总体框架、运作流程及核心技术。该系统可以使不同地域不同领域的专家应用异地分布的各种资源在网络环境下对复杂产品的总体方案进行交互协同论证,这对提高论证工作的科学性与合理性,拓展工作的方法和手段有重要的指导作用。     

An Integrated Approach to Designing and Evaluating Collaborative Applications and Infrastructures

Collaborative systems include both general infrastructures and specific applications for supporting collaboration. Because of the relative newness and complexity of these systems, it has been unclear what approach should be used to design and evaluate them. Based on the lessons learned from our work and that of others on collaborative systems, we have derived an integrated approach to researching collaborative applications and infrastructures. The approach can be described as a sequence of steps: We decompose the functionality of collaboration systems into smaller functions that can be researched more-or-less independently. For each of these functions, we adopt general (system-independent) principles regarding the design and implementation of the function, identify collaboration scenarios at multiple levels of abstraction, identify requirements based on the scenarios, adopt an interaction model to meet the requirements, realize the interaction model as a concrete user interface, develop a logical architecture of the system, identify a physical architecture for placing the logical components in a distributed system, develop infrastructure abstractions, use the abstractions to implement applications, and perform lab studies, field experiments, and simulations to evaluate the infrastructure and applications. As in other models with multiple phases, feedback from subsequent phases is used to modify the results from the previous phases. In this paper, we describe, illustrate and motivate this research plan.     

An Improved Method for Global Solution of Non-Linear Systems

In this paper, two modifications of an interval method for global solution of systems of non-linear equations are suggested. The first consists in reducing the size of the linear interval system that is to be solved at each iteration of the method. The second incorporates the constraint propagation approach in solving the reduced linear system. The modifications introduced result in a method of improved numerical efficiency.     

一种基于隐Markov模型的网络安全态势感知方法研究

为了准确评估网络系统的安全状态,文章提出一种基于隐Markov模型(HMM)的网络安全态势感知方法.首先通过对系统多种安全检测数据融合,得到系统的网络结构、资产、威胁和脆弱性数据的规范化数据;接着对系统中的每个资产,将该资产受到的威胁和存在的脆弱性结合起来,分析影响该资产的安全事件序列,分别建立该资产保密性、完整性和可用性三个安全性分量的HMM,采用滑动窗口机制将观测序列分段训练,并采用带遗忘因子的更新算法得到HMM的各个参数;然后根据HMM和观测序列分析该资产安全状态,评估该资产的安全态势分量;最后综合分析网络中所有资产的安全态势分量,评估网络的安全态势分量,并根据应用背景评估网络的整体安全态势.实验分析表明,基于HMM的网络安全态势感知方法符合实际应用,评估结果准确有效.     

异步电机智能测试系统的研究与实现

提出了异步电机测试的疏失误差剔除和数据挖掘方法,在此基础上设计的异步电机智能测试系统,介绍了系统的构成与工作原理,详细介绍了异步电机智能测试的疏失误差剔除和数据挖掘方法与软件抗干扰方法.实际应用表明,据此研制的异步电机智能测试系统具有稳定性好、灵敏度高、响应速度快、使用寿命长等特点.     

一种基于重用的领域模型分类方法

文中提出了一种领域模型的分类方法，以促进软件重用，虽然领域分析在软件重用中扮演了重析角色，但是却很难运用，特别是对于新的应用领域更是如此，软件重用中类比方法，通过提供相似领域的软件模型来支持领域分析，为了实现这种类比的方法，领域模型需要分类，文中所提出的方法是分层枚举（ｅｎｕｍｅｒａｔｉｖｅｈｉｅｒａｒｃｈｙ）和刻面方法（ｆａｃｅｔｅｄｓｃｈｅｍｅ）的综合，从而使领域分析者可以很方便的地确定一个相